Quote

No touching Baby Jesus.” “But we’re his parents!” proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation. “Mary Beth,” Barb Wiggin said, “if you touch the Baby Jesus, I’m putting you in a cow costume.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Parents
Include
Barb
Parent
Cows
Appellation
Poor
Touching
Barbs
Jesus
Mary
Beth
Generous
Proclaimed
Putting
Joseph
Touch
Costume
Baby
Costumes

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The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
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Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.
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Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
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Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
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If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
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In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
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Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!
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Half my life is an act of revision.
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They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
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The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
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Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
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I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
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My life is a reading list.
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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